Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia

1. Purity of Essence

1 / Purity of Essence* One always sleeps with the dead. I Proverb In January 1842, Edgar Allan Poe’s young wife, Virginia , sustained a horrifying accident: while singing, she began to bleed from the mouth. This incident was in fact a pulmonary hemorrhage, symptomatic of tuberculosis, the "white plague” that would take her life. For two weeks after this event, Virginia lay in bed terribly ill, hardly able to breathe. The progress of her illness followed its inexorable course through to the moment of her death, on 30 January 1847, at the age of twenty-five. This tragedy would mark one of the obscure and catastrophic origins of a modernism that arose from the ruins of classic forms and romantic passions. In Illness asMetaphor, Susan Sontag charac- *The title of this chapter is in homage to Stanley Kubrick’sDr. Strangelove , one of the narrative keys to which is the solution of a coded paranoid message that, if found in time, would save the world from nuclear apocalypse: Purity of Essence—POE. In the film, the solution is discovered too late. In a similar spirit, I have always thought that the word "Nevermore” could well havebeen used as the epigraph to this film. / 1 Chapter 1 terizes the nearly mythic signification of tuberculosis as it was perceived in the nineteenth century: “disintegration, febrilization , dematerialization,” "speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it,” "the preferred way of giving death a meaning—an edifying , refined disease,” "the romantic disease which cuts off a young life,” "an aphrodisiac," "a decorative, often lyrical death.”1 In what would become a decadent fin-de-siècle symbol, the "white death" marked a certain dystopic erotic ideal, until the moment that it was definitively supplanted in morbid symbolism first by the extravagantly symbolic gesticulations of hysterics diagnosed and idealized by Charcot and Freud, and then by the real and aesthetic ravages of the "cubist war," which brought disfiguration and morbid prosthetic reconstruction to new heights. Finally, the proto-modernist aesthetic pathology of the "white death" would be inverted and deposed by the high-modernist anti-ideals of schizophrenia and the "black death," most notably instantiated in Antonin Artaud’s "The Theater and the Plague," a danse macabre itself prefigured by Poe’s "The Masque of the Red Death." Poe's writing bears a unique place in the midnineteenth century paradigm shift at the origins of modernism, insofar as it established new connections and novel contradictions between voice and body, corporeality and disembodiment, signifier and signified, sense and signification, cognition and dissociation, love and death, rationalism and theology. Poe's work is imbued with death in the vast multiplicity of its forms; as J. Gerald Kennedy points out, in Poe, Deathy and the Life of Writing: "Here we find a writer whose entire oeuvre is marked by a compulsive interest in the dimensionality of death: its physical signs, the phenomenology of dying, the deathbed scene, the appearance of the corpse, the effects of decomposition , the details of burial, the danger of premature interment, the reanimation of the dead, the lure of tombs and cemeteries, the nature of mourning and loss, the experience of dread, the compulsion to inflict death upon another, and the perverse desire to seek one's own death."2 Noteworthy is the fact that Poe / 2 Purity of Essence often aestheticized death by symbolizing diseases of the lungs and derangements of breath. For Poe, such mortal illnesses and forms of death were steeped in the uncanny, consciously and unconsciously linked to the death of his mother, Eliza, a famous actress and singer, who died in 1811 when Edgar Allan was still an infant. The work of mourning associated with these events— ephemeral beauty, loss of breath, silencing of voice and song, the advent of illness, horrible death—was the key to his psychology and iconography, and constituted a central aspect of his narrative innovations. Such is the condition of all writing, as Kennedy suggests: Indeed, we might saythat the desire to write originates in the paradox that the death of writing—the fixed "body" of the text, as it were—insures the life of its spirit or sense. It is a commonplace that writing has an existence independent of its author, but Ong locates an additional truth: that writing incarnates the very principle of life in its removal from the carnal world of time, change, and death. While the finality of death creates in...